rod the dusty pathway. Her proud spirit revolted,
more and more, at the apparent injustice. She had studied the
organization of society. She was familiar with the modes of popular
oppression. She understood the operation of that system of taxes, so
ingeniously devised to sink the mass of the people in poverty and
degradation, that princes and nobles might revel in voluptuous
splendor. Indignation nerved her spirit as she reflected upon the
usurpation thus ostentatiously displayed. The seclusion in which she
lived encouraged deep musings upon these vast inequalities of life.
Piety had not taught her submission. Philosophy had not yet taught her
the impossibility of adjusting these allotments of our earthly state,
so as to distribute the gifts of fortune in accordance with merit.
Little, however, did the proud grandees imagine, as in courtly
splendor they swept by the plebeian maiden, enveloping her in the dust
of their chariots, that her voice would yet aid to upheave their
castles from their foundations, and whelm the monarchy and the
aristocracy of France in one common ruin.

At this time circumstances brought her in contact with several ladies
connected with noble families. The ignorance of these ladies, their
pride, their arrogance, excited in Jane's mind deep contempt. She
could not but feel her own immeasurable superiority over them, and yet
she perceived with indignation that the accident of birth invested
them with a factitious dignity, which enabled them to look down upon
her with condescension. A lady of noble birth, who had lost fortune
and friends through the fraud and dissipation of those connected with
her, came to board for a short time in her father's family. This lady
was forty years of age, insufferably proud of her pedigree, and in her
manners stiff and repulsive. She was exceedingly illiterate and
uninformed, being unable to write a line with correctness, and having
no knowledge beyond that which may be picked up in the ball-room and
the theater. There was nothing in her character to win esteem. She was
trying, by a law-suit, to recover a portion of her lost fortune. Jane
wrote petitions for her, and letters, and sometimes went with her to
make interest with persons whose influence would be important. She
perceived that, notwithstanding her deficiency in every personal
quality to inspire esteem or love, she was treated, in consequence of
her birth, with the most marked deference. Whenever she mentione